Since education makes a person more likely to leave your region, how do you justify your investment in human capital?

Monday, August 02, 2010

Some Rust Belt Chic History

Rust Belt Chic is a dated cultural artifact. As the term implies, the appreciation of this blue collar ethos is snooty. Harvey Pekar's wife Joyce Brabner explains:

I'll tell you the relationship between New York and Cleveland. We are the people that all those anorexic vampires with their little black miniskirts and their black leather jackets come to with their video cameras to document Rust Belt chic. MTV people knocking on our door, asking to get pictures of Harvey emptying the garbage, asking if they can shoot footage of us going bowling. But we don't go bowling, we go to the library, but they don't want to shoot that. So, that's it. We're just basically these little pulsating jugular veins waiting for you guys to leech off some of our nice, homey, backwards Cleveland stuff.

I love that quote (from the mid-1990s). It puts Anthony Bourdain's celebration of Pekar in a different light, an exploitative one. Brabner also highlights the important linkages between Cleveland and New York City. Regardless, authentic Rust Belt is a cosmopolitan preoccupation.

Part of the success of vacationing in a dying industrial hot-spot is to have like-minded travel mates who also want to spend a goodly amount of time riding bicycles up hills as well as be surrounded by abandon buildings, lots of brickwork, the oxidized colors of industrial decay, and loud, sometimes sudden clanging noises. Luckily my buds Meg and Jean are exactly those type of people. And we were doubly lucky to be housed by our New England ex-pat friends Miriam and Jeffery.

So long Providence - hello western PA. Yes, we packed up and moved to Pittsburgh. We really did it. Here we are. Pittsburgh! There is a great post-industrial decay vibe here that is really exciting. Kind of like Providence ten years ago, before it sucked.

Providence has substantial Rust Belt city credentials. There is considerable interest in the "post-industrial decay vibe" among artists. I should note that Miriam and Jefferey opened a cafe in Morningside. I think they qualify as members of Pittsburgh's burgeoning hipster scene, a Rust Belt Chic community. They are indicators of an important talent migration to Pittsburgh that has been going on longer than many people think.

What a two minute overview might depict as a dying, post-industrial town, Harvey celebrated as a living, breathing, richly textured society.

A place so incongruously and uniquely...seductive that I often fantasize about making my home there. Though I've made television all over the world, often in faraway and "exotic" places, it's the Cleveland episode that is my favorite--and one about which I am most proud.

A New Yorker from New Jersey is fantasizing about moving to Cleveland. That's the upside to Rust Belt Chic and a movement I see taking root. Each shrinking city would seem to have its own unique brand to pitch to those looking for alternatives to their first-tier city digs. Now is a good time to come home.

3 comments:

Since returning from PGH, PA (lovely as ever), I've been following Levis' "Go Forth" campaign featuring Braddock more closely than probably any other recent media development (except possibly, for MTV's Jersey Shore, since that is where I grew up and sometimes, late at night, I long for the shrill sounds of guidos, all gel'd up and fist pumping... but I digress!)

What are your thoughts on the good/bad of this campaign? I've been referring to it as "Blue Collar Fetishism", but Rust Belt Chic seems a little kinder.

I'm a fan of the "Go Forth" campaign. The bad stems from "Local Fetishism". That is, a Harvard grad from York, PA has no business telling Braddock what to do. My retort would be Phil Kidd, a champion of Youngstown, Ohio who isn't from there. I love Pittsburgh, but was born in Erie.

We're all outsiders. We're Blue Collar Fetishists. We also have Rust Belt cred. We care what happens to these cities.

That's the good of the campaign. That's the gospel of Rust Belt Chic. Levis wants to associate itself with our community. Phil Kidd could sell a lot of jeans.

lolz. Some people still think of PVD as a pit, others think it's too gentrified. It's true that the city has a driving core of young artsy types, but it also has 25% unemployment, mostly immigrant. Take your pick.

To be honest, I think Miriam is in a fairly thin demographic. A most-extreme type of self-reliance that requires the most dire circumstance.

One factor we've identified in migration is that a certain type of person wants to settle somewhere that's "unfinished". That is, there is plenty of space to start a business or buy a house and become a future town elder.

New York, then, is probably the most finished city in the country. It takes a lot to make an impact.

Providence is starting to get a little finished, but it's not all that. Neighboring Pawtucket is, in fact, a pit with enough post-industrial decay to satisfy the garden-variety hipster.

I'd say that we're actually a net plus migration in the hipster demographic, although I have nothing to back that up. Just the gut. Losses are likely 50+. We're in a big, big rotation of population and economy.

The "hipster" vote (which really means professionals in their 30s and 40s on the east side, plus, you know, the hipsters on the west side and the immigrant community on the south side) just won a ringing victory for a Latino progressive candidate for mayor. In fact, there was yet another progressive surge at the local and state level. 9 of about 60 incumbents in the General Assembly went down, almost all attacked from the left.

Do keep an eye on us. As HP Lovecraft said, PVD is "that universal haven of the odd, the free and the dissenting."

As for "ruin porn" (which phrase I love), check out our local Art in Ruins. The proprietors bought an old Grants department store in, wait for it, Pawtucket and made it into offices.